What happened to this week?

Where did the week go? It's Friday already, and I feel like I'm still on Wednesday. For that matter, what happened to August? The first week was a nice leisurely vacation, then I came home and tried to catch up, and now it's almost over?

Last weekend we had a party here for my husband's coworkers. All of his co-workers are men (engineers). Two of them forgot to inform their wives, and thus had other plans made for them causing them to back out at the last minute. Two more of the wives suddenly felt feverish the day of the party and decided to stay home. We ended up with 13 adults, 2 kids, and 1 baby.

The co-workers are all city-people, most of them apartment dwellers. All of them thought we lived in the middle of nowhere with a ridiculously long commute to civilization. Aparently the tradition with work-related socialization here in Sweden is that the spouses are never included. This includes things like the company Christmas party. I found it a bit frustrating that I never knew who my husband was talking about. I also found it frustrating that it's rather impossible to meet people and make new friends.

Because of the unpredictable weather here, I planned on serving the meal in the little barn (that I use as my gallery). Half of the barn is now filled with my husband's junk, so I cleaned and hung some of my photos in the other half. Cleaning the barn took several hours even though it had been used just a few months ago. There were dead insects all over the floor, and it seemed like a spider had moved into every nook and cranny. Good thing we have a shop-vac! I worried that city-folk would be uncomfortable eating in a place like this, but by the time I was done cleaning and decorating, it looked quite inviting.

Of course people would want to see our house also, so even if we weren't spending much time there, I put in a lot of hours trying to tidy up the place. I'm glad I was able to schedule the cleaning lady for the day before, but even then, she just dusts and vacuums around our junk. She doesn't put anything away. My husband decided that the bathroom needed repainting (it definitely did!) so we did that too. It's nice to have something still looking nice now even after the party.

I made venison stew, fruit and veggie plates, and provided chips, dip, and drinks. We almost ran out of drinks since it turned out to be beautiful warm weather (much better than forecast). Other people brought potato salad, pasta salad, green salads, rolls, and desserts. I guess the concept of a pot-luck isn't very clear here, since some people brought enough to feed an army. I think we have leftover bread in the freezer to last us a month!

We had a bunch of garden games like badminton and croquet, but nobody chose to play. For entertainment, my husband loaded people on the trailer behind the ATV and took them on a tour of the forest. Our daughter was a great host to the other kid, a 3 year old girl. They enjoyed the trampoline and my daughter's electric car. We all enjoyed watching them play.

So it turned out to be a very nice gathering with pleasant company and lots of good food. I consider it a success, and I think the others did too.